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To queer people for whom it is unsafe to come out, I say, I am so sorry. You are beautiful, you are handsome, you are normal, you are wonderful, you are precious, and you are worthy. Whether you are out or not. The closet is the worst prison, and I my deepest desire for you is that your world is soon brought up to standard, that you will have the freedom to be who you were meant to be, the freedom to love yourself.

I'm looking for a word to replace brought up to standard. The best I can come up with is cured, but cured means that it was once already in a healthy state, and is being restored to it; that is not the case in my scenario.

I want a word that means to mature and to make right something that has never been right. The word might be rectify, but onomatopoetically, that sounds too ... mechanical?

Ideas?

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    My idea is that rectify might be the best you're gonna get here. It seems to me every single-word term with the general sense of improve to some [pre-established] adequate standard will carry a strong implication that we know what the necessary "adequate standard" is because it did actually exist in the past, so now only needs to be "recovered", not created from scratch.
    – FumbleFingers
    Oct 11, 2020 at 18:00
  • @FumbleFingers It's the word I went with.
    – dx_over_dt
    Oct 11, 2020 at 18:01
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    if you're prepared to go with multi-word terms, sufficiently improved pretty much carries the sense you want without implying returning to some more optimal condition in the past. But the "trickiness" of the context even comes through there (how to define "sufficiently" if there's no preceding example of what we're aiming for, given that having the freedom to be who you were meant to be is ridiculously vague! :)
    – FumbleFingers
    Oct 11, 2020 at 18:04

2 Answers 2

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My first thought was normalized.

Normalize
verb

  1. bring or return to a normal or standard condition or state. "the situation had normalized"

[Lexico]

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"...and I my deepest desire for you is that your world..."

  • ...will soon merge with mainstream culture.

merge - "combine or cause to combine to form a single entity."

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  • Hmm. Mainstream culture in America, unfortunately, is homophobic and transphobic. At least it feels that way to me.
    – dx_over_dt
    Oct 11, 2020 at 17:43
  • It only feels like that to you because most mainstream media constantly pumps out the message that everyone in the country (apart from them and their audience / readership) is seriously problematic. And they only do that because it sells newspapers and airtime, not because it reflects anything about the real world, or what real people think.
    – FumbleFingers
    Oct 11, 2020 at 17:51
  • @dx_over_dt The dissipation of all prejudice is a sine qua non for the merge.
    – Centaurus
    Oct 11, 2020 at 17:54
  • @FumbleFingers it feels that way to me because I have been rejected by loved ones and taunted by strangers
    – dx_over_dt
    Oct 11, 2020 at 17:56

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